Pumpkin spice products on shelves

Between 2010 and 2021, American shelves held more pumpkin spice products each fall and American self-publishers uploaded more books each month, and the two trends have climbed together (r = 0.957) in a tribute to scale achieved without gatekeeping. Nobody is stopping the autumnal latte; nobody is stopping the unedited memoir. Both categories feel slightly larger than the market needed.

Pumpkin spice products on US shelves grew from about 100 SKUs in 2010 to over 400 by 2021, with the category extending into yogurt, hummus, dog treats, and even cheese; US self-published titles climbed from about 150,000 per year to over 1.5 million, as Amazon KDP, Smashwords, and Draft2Digital eliminated the last practical barriers to uploading. Both are categories in which the marginal cost of adding one more product is effectively zero, and the market response has been, in both cases, supply-unlimited. The long tail, in both industries, is very long and very lightly read.

A new pumpkin-spice hummus arrives. A new self-published novella is submitted. Both are unasked for. Both are available.